New Art and Design: 2011

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Should Lady GaGa be a painter...

Now open your eyes and look at this, she (Lady GaGa) has over 10.000.000 (ten million) followers on Twitter http://twitter.com/ladygaga. It's like an entire population of a country like Belgium or a State like Michigan following her! Not too bad. Just for comparison. Gerhard Richter, arguably one of the greatest painters of our times has just 5000 followers on Twitter. No, just around 4627 as of today just to be clever http://twitter.com/gerhardrichter

What are both of them doing? Both producing imagery of our times, indeed. Both making a lot of money from their artwork. Is Lady Gaga a true pop artist like Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter is a true aristocrat like a British Queen. But wait British Monarchy has 185,339 followers on twitter, a bit more. Definetely wide popularity is not a goal for a Richter. Question arises. Should the Contemporary art be made more popular and accessible to a wider audience? Or should the wider audience be left with a cheap copies of old masters many of them buy to decorate the walls. Of course posters also and option, but what a disregard for an art of painting itself is existence of those cheap copies which is everywhere. Just search Google. On first pages of search for a painting you will find dozens of a cheap painting factories instead of a promicing young painters. Those young painters who can't make a decent living from their art anymore. Interesting, can Google see the difference between paintingz and paintings? And why the paintingz and canvasez prevail in their usually quality results?

Interesting question. How did with such a small interest of general public in art, some art still commanding such prices at the auctions, $10,000,000, $40,000,000 for contemporary art isn't surprising sum. But how many artworks will newer ever be sold. Have you ever counted the number of working artists?

Is billionaires most caring people about art, just those who finally got little bit more time to understand it? Or it's just an another fashionable toy, such expensive and lucrative toy for a few. Now some more statistics. Both, Tate director Nicholas Serota and MoMA director Glenn Lowry having around 1000 Google searches per month, Gerhard Richter has 60,000, Damien Hirst has 130,000 and Lady Gaga, ok well 25,000,000... and Van Gogh has around 2,250,000 those interested in his art and consequences of life. Mozart by the way is not far forgotten today as well, 3,300,000 searches for his name is not a small amount. But Lady Gaga topped him almost 10 times. What a power of marketing i must admit.

Friday, January 28, 2011

New American Painters

Nicholas Chistiakov is a young Belarusian American conceptual artist and painter working with diverse media. He began producing art in 1990-ies and actively working in the present. His art is a sharp reflection of modernity, an artistic response to our time. In his work he uses variety of subjects, ranging from mythic figures to contemporary urban landscapes. He explores painting in a multiple ways, utilizing styles ranging from photorealist painting to almost abstract expressionist. He always utilizing subjects of his works to serve an abstract artistic goals. For him any subject is an interplay of form, shadow and light. He is restricting himself from naturalist vision of reality in favor of abstract artistic goals. His painting are often depiction of biomorphic semi-abstracted figures isolated in the abstract space. His art is a specific reflection of important events of our time. He seeks for an iconic imagery that represent modernity. Terror of 9-11 left a specific trace on his art. Human tragedy and suffering are the main themes for many of his canvases. Such works as "The Midday Suicide" is an iconic interpretation of tortured life, possibly very close to lives of those female suicide bombers whose actions are widely known and have a great impact on the way we perceive life and death in modernity. Everything might be over in the matter of seconds. People don't have a control of a fragile life anymore. Phenomenon of momentary death is the extremely important for the artist. Sometime he uses known people in his art, he has created a series of portraits of screaming and exploding George W. Bush, a metaphor for what was happening in day of September 2001. Artists seeks his own language, he thinks that contemporary art should seek other methods and forms than art of the past. Old masters indeed great, their art is eternal, but modernity requires different vision, methods and approaches. His art extremely influenced by photography. Modern media greatly affected painting. Many assumed that photography was meant death to painting - in reality this is not, photography helped the painting to find new expressive forms. While taking his subjects directly from photographs, artist prevents himself from copying it exactly - his art often an abstracted blurred interpretation of photography. Every image is an abstraction first at all, there is faces, buildings, trees, clouds, but all of this could be seen firstly as combination of basic geometric forms. This forms he uses to build his compositions. Epic landscapes and seascapes are characteristic for his oeuvre as well - he see the nature as an eternal media which is the connection of past, present and future. Painter actively using color in his work. His photo-based paintings are often monochromatic, while figurative paintings 1 are often use bright palette and almost primary colors. His art is not likely associated with the popular culture, this is rather depiction of subjects of everyday life, common and familiar to everyone. He seeks for a greatness of unimportant, rather unnoticed. He puts reality at the different angle. He finds the moments in the daily routine which is important and might be eternal. He is often able to capture time itself - in the fleeting of painterly layers we see the years of life, from beginning to the end, from the cradle to the grave.

http://www.nicholaschistiakov.com
http://en.nicholaschistiakov.com

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

New Art Galleries

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